I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Marlowe and his wife Ann at the 1997 Bouchercon in Monterey, at which he received the Private Eye Writers of America’s Life Achievement Award – an honor that I was privileged to help bring about.

Steve and I corresponded often in the years since; I considered him a friend and I believe he felt the same about me. In 2002 he and Ed Gorman both asked me to write a preface to Drum Beat: The Chester Drum Casebook – a collection of five short stories and one complete novel (Drum Beat–Dominique) that was published by Five Star the following year.

Below is the first three-quarters of that preface, “A Fast Drumroll,” which gives a concise and I hope worthy overview of Steve’s life and career.

A FAST DRUMROLL

by Bill Pronzini

When Stephen Marlowe introduced Washington, D.C.-based private investigator Chester Drum in the mid-1950s, both the traditional private eye tale and the tough-and-sexy paperback original were at or near their height of popularity.

The first six Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane were runaway bestseller; Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer was well-established, as were Thomas B. Dewey’s Mac, Wade Miller’s Max Thursday, and Brett Halliday’s Michael Shayne, among others. Softcover publishers were selling millions of copies annually by well-known professionals and such discoveries as John D. MacDonald and Richard S. Prather.

Of the dozens of new detective characters who were born each month in paperback editions, most had exploitive, lackluster careers and passed on with little notice. Only a handful made any kind of lasting impact, and fewer still were innovative enough to enter the pantheon of distinguished fictional sleuths. Chet Drum was and is one of that rarified number.

The reason for Drum’s success is twofold. First: Unlike his contemporaries, nearly all of whom plied their trade in a large, urban U.S. environment, his “beat” was international and the cases he investigated of a far-reaching, often volatile political nature. While he maintained an office in Washington – and later, another in Geneva, Switzerland – his cases took him to such global locales as Iceland, India, Russia, Spain, France, Italy, and South America.

And second: Drum’s creator is both a writer of considerable talent and a lifelong globetrotter himself. The respected critic Anthony Boucher, reviewing one of the early Drum novels in the New York Times, said that “very few writers of the tough private-eye story can tell it more accurately than Mr. Marlowe, or with such taut understatement of violence and sex.”

He might have added that Marlowe’s depictions of foreign backgrounds, the result of first-hand experience, are as vividly rendered as they are authentic. And that Chet Drum is a fully realized character, believable as both man and detective – intelligent, tough when he has to be, compassionate yet unsentimental.

The first Drum novel, The Second Longest Night, appeared in 1955. Notably, the publisher was Fawcett Gold Medal, the first of the paperback houses to specialize in original, male-oriented category fiction. (Not “pulp fiction,” a term that has been grossly misused since the Tarantino film, but rather an apotheosis of the true, pulp-magazine fiction of the ’30s and ’40s. The best of the softcover originals published by Fawcett, and such others as Lion, Dell, and Avon, were rough-hewn, minor works of art, perfectly suited to and representative of their era.)

Between 1955 and 1968, Marlowe produced twenty Drum novels for Gold Medal, resulting in an aggregate sales of several million copies. One of these, Double in Trouble (1959), was a collaboration with Richard S. Prather, in which Drum joins forces with Prather’s Shell Scott to solve a common case.

Despite the lurid titles of some of the early entries – Killers Are My Meat, Homicide Is My Game, Peril Is My Pay – all are literate, fast-paced, action-oriented without being overly violent, sexy without being sex-laden, and compulsively readable.

Although he was still in his twenties when he created Chester Drum, Stephen Marlowe was already an established writer. (“At the age of eight,” he has been quoted as saying, “I wanted to be a writer and I never changed my mind.”) In 1949, after graduation from William and Mary, he joined the staff of a prominent New York literary agency and soon began to sell science fiction to Amazing Stories and other leading pulp magazines of that era; most of these, as well as a number of adult and young-adult s-f novels, appeared under his birth name, Milton Lesser.

By the mid-1950s, he felt he’d done as much as he wanted in the s-f field and was beginning to concentrate on suspense fiction. He became a regular contributor to such digest-sized, hardboiled crime-fiction magazines as Manhunt (where the first Drum short story, “My Son and Heir,” was published in 1955, Accused, Hunted, and Pursuit.

His first suspense novel, Catch the Brass Ring, appeared as an Ace Double paperback in 1954. Several other non-series novels followed, under the Stephen Marlowe byline and as by C. H. Thames; the most accomplished of these is the unfortunately-titled Blonde Bait (Avon, 1959, as by Marlowe). In addition to the Drums, he also wrote two other series: a pair of private eye tales as by Andrew Fraser, and four enjoyable novels featuring a team of investigators for “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” as by Jason Ridgway.

When changing tastes and editorial policies brought about the cancellation of the Drum series in 1968, Marlowe turned to more ambitious suspense novels with international settings and complex themes. These include Come Over, Red Rover(1968), The Summit(1970), and The Cawthorn Journals (1975), the last named a chilling narrative set in Mexico that explores the reality of magic, the nature of evil, and the corruption of power.

His literary interest and intent metamorphosed yet again in the 1980s, when he began a series of brilliantly conceived, meticulously researched novels exploring the lives and personalities of genuine historical figures. The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus (1987) became a critically acclaimed international bestseller, as did The Lighthouse at the End of the World (1995), a seminal study of the tortured genius, Edgar Allan Poe, and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes (1996), which he considers the best of all his novels.

Marlowe’s horizons may yet change again; the novel he is presently writing [2002] is contemporary in setting and different in theme from anything else he has done. “The last thing you want,” he says, “is to feel jaded by or with your work. The New York Times once called me the most prolific mystery writer in the United States. I said, ‘Good Lord, I don’t want to be the most prolific anything; I would love to be the best.’”

6 Responses to “Bill Pronzini on STEPHEN MARLOWE, 1928-2008.”

As a long time fan of Marlowe I appreciated the tribute. I followed his career from Chester Drum to the later literary novels and enjoyed them all along the way. He may not have been the most popular of the Gold Medal writers, but I always felt the Drum books were a step above the rest, and that he would have been equally at home in hardcovers (which he eventually was). The hallmark of the Drum books aside from the settings was always an understated literacy that never got in the way of the action, but gave the best of them a weight sometimes missing from other GM series (no matter how much I enjoyed them). I always ranked Marlowe with MacDonald, Hamilton, and Charles Williams at the top of the heap in terms of the quality of the product. Of his later novels, two you don’t mention are very good, The Man With No Shadow is reminiscent of a Graham Greene novel, and Colossus, his biographical novel of Goya is a fine work.

Hi, I’ve been a fan of Marlowe’s works for a long time. I specially love his novels on Columbus, Cervantes and Goya, and I can’t understand why he has not received the critical attention his historical narratives, along with all his other works, deserve.
I wonder if anyone could answer a doubt? Is there any chance the just released film Valkyrie is based on Marlowe’s novel The Valkyrie Encounter?
And do you know if David Lynch’s attempted film on Marlowe’s A Lighthouse at the End of the World did finally come out?
Thanks so much.

As far as I know the Lynch adaptation is just another project that never got very far like the Peter Glenville movie of Morris West’s Tower of Babel or Hitchcock’s film of From Russia With Love. You might try IMDB since they cover films in production or suspended, and there is likely a site for Lynch, if not an official one then a fan site.

The term “Valkerie” was the code Von Stauffenberg and the other conspirators used for the attempted assassination of Hitler, so it is most likely just a coincidence that the two have similar names. You might check IMDB for the credits to be certain. There is also a very good novel on the conspiracy by Hans Helmut Kirst (Night of the Generals among others), and I would imagine several non fiction histories.

Marlowe’s biographical historical novels did recieve quite good critical reception at the time, and if I recall correctly both Colossus and Lighthouse were New York Times Notable Books of the Year, In addition I know he won a major French literary award (the Prix de Concort?). His post-Drum books had very good sales, and I think at least one, Summit, was either a best seller or close to it.

Today he is somewhat forgotten, but he’s hardly alone in that. Frank Yerby, Edison Marshall, and Samuel Shellabarger all were major best selling writers and little of their work is available, or for that matter Thomas B. Costain or A.J. Cronin. The sad thing is that Marlowe is a bit harder to find because he wasn’t in that superseller category. Still, it’s not had to find many of the Drum books and with a little work probably most of the others can be found as well.

Barring a major film being based on one of his books there isn’t likely to be much of a revival of his historicals, though the Drum books, and particularly the one he did in collaboration with Richard Prather teaming Drum and Shell Scott, might fare better. At least the Drum books are fairly easy to find on-line and at second hand book stores.

Dear Bill,
Thank you for your write-up on Stephen (Milton). I absolutely LOVED the 3 novels he wrote on real historical personalities, Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, Lighthouse at the End of the World, and my all-time favorite The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes. I agree with you and his international acclaim, he’s a genius writer. Why I’m commenting here is to ask if you know why Marlowe is so difficult to find any information on through the internet. There’s barely a photo of him and his best titles don’t even register at http://www.fantasticfiction.com, a site that records anyone who’s written anything. Yes, wikipedia does have a short entry, but considering Marlowe’s talent, I find it surprising he’s falling into obscurity online. Anyway, thank you for your piece. What a privilege it must have been to know Stephen.

I just ordered Drum Beat: The Chester Drum Casebook after reading Bill Pronzini’s insightful look at one of my favorite writers. I started reading the Milton Lesser SF novels published by Winston back when I was a kid. Later, I discovered the Chester Drum novels. As Bill Pronzini said, Stephen Marlowe’s works are a cut above the rest.